Reader, your faithful blogger is kind of flagging, so today you get an unstructured, but blessedly short, rant about "honor." Ready?
I've had dudes tell me, straight to my face, that men have "honor" and women don't. This is so antiquated, and I hate it. I especially hate it because I'm rather invested in trying to be an honorable person myself. For me, this mostly means "you do the shit that you say you're gonna do," which is related to a whole bunch of other things. Not being a hypocrite. Being punctual. Not trying to get away with shit I know I shouldn't be doing. Checking with friends before I date their exes. Washing and ironing cloth napkins for the rest of my life because I convinced my mom to switch from paper when I was a kid and it just seems fair that I should have to do so as an adult, too. That sort of thing.
None of this should be gendered; women are quite capable of being honest and conscientious in any aspect of life, and if you disagree you are profoundly misogynistic. Also, dumb -- why would we (on average) entrust the less honorable sex with raising our children? Yet this particular combination of reliability and ethics that we call "honor" is peculiarly gendered, and I don't understand why. It's something that we should all strive to embody, regardless of our gender.
... Really? What kind of literally says, "Women don't have honor. It is a concept that pertains only to men." Upon reading the title, I was prepared for a rant about the nonsense of conflating a woman's honor with her virginity, but this is even worse.
ReplyDeleteA related issue is the concept of being a "man" by doing one's duty. I.e., "I should live up to my obligations. That's what a man does." When what they really mean (or should mean), is "That's what an adult does."